Thanks for the very detailed insights 
Just tried your approach using the exposure module first to get the midtones where I want ignoring clipped highlights and appliying filmic RGB after that.
That gave me a nice result. First it was a bit milky but after adding local contrast and haze removal it became very good.
After filmic I continued with denoising and sharpening when I had a very strange behavior: I used the highpass module with blending mode ‘overlay’ to sharpen the image. This module totally flattened the highlights as if they were clipped (see the dog’s forehead and the histogram). Afterwards I changed highlight reconstruction without any change.
A check of the pixelpipe showed that the highpass module was between exposure and the filmic module. I moved the highpass module behind filmic and everything was fine again, see video below: